Tonight I am on a walk, recording a voice memo, which is actually my happy place. I've been recording videos of myself walking and talking, and it's been cathartic in its own way. But my real storytelling doesn't happen when any of you are watching. The thinking I do — the deep thinking — I don't do on camera.
I'm not as brave as some of you.
My neurodivergent brain — if you had to watch a video of me telling a story, it would probably take about two hours because of the pauses. For those of you who know me, you know what I'm talking about. It's a classic me trait. Sometimes I'm in the middle of a conversation and it'll take me ten seconds to get the next words out of my mouth, and my husband will be like, okay, you're done now. Handing over to someone else.
I'm like, no. I'm not done yet.
The words are in my head. They just can't come out of my mouth. Just give me a second.
Now I'm having to pick up a poo my dog just did on the side of the road, which is also why doing these stories over video isn't always that nice for you to watch. But hey, that's what it takes in a world of find-the-time — to talk and process and do it all.
It's never perfect. There's never a perfect starting point. Just go outside. Take a walk. If you're feeling inclined to say anything, to share anything, please never feel like there is any barrier. Whatever it is that you have to say, always feel free to share it in any form.
Some send audio notes. Some send video recordings. Some send ready-to-publish stories. Others ask for help editing. However you choose to do it, please, please, please don't judge yourself for the form that feels truest to you.
Just start talking.
I said to one of our Chief Moms yesterday that the craziest thing about this archive is that when you actually give yourself space to tell a story — or sometimes don't even think it through, just put your subconscious to work — the story ends up telling itself.
So. Back to the story I planned to tell.
Restoration and resurrection. The two of them go hand in hand for me.
The restoration was a moment in my life when I was literally restoring a 1930s farmhouse. I called it a farmhouse. People in Vermont, if you're listening, may not call it a proper farmhouse — very discerning folks in Vermont when it comes to what type or style of home something is. For anyone outside of Vermont, I think we would call it a farmhouse. It was a big old house, over 3,000 square feet, on four acres, that we took down to the studs.
We were living in LA. And then COVID hit.
I was working at Snapchat at the time, and our CEO made one of the most progressive work-from-home policy decisions I'd seen. In May or June of 2020, he said we didn't have to be back in the office until September 2021. He did that because everyone was living in a state of heightened anxiety — when do we have to go back? Is it this week? Is it next week? He did a really good job of taking away some unnecessary noise by accepting that it would take a long time for COVID to go away. So he may as well release us from having to think about when the return to office would be, and let us focus on doing our jobs.
My husband is also a strategist and historian in his own shape and form. We'd been doing a bunch of research ourselves, and we were like — this thing is not going away for a long time. If we just got told we don't have to be back in the office for over a year, let's plan for it taking even longer than that.
My husband and I are a partnership born out of a commitment to always looking where we're going, looking where we're at, and constantly evaluating — feeling comfortable evaluating — whether where we're headed is where we want to be in that moment.
After Evan, the CEO of Snap, made that announcement, we both said fuck it. This may be the last time in our working lives that we get to live in the countryside. We both work in tech, marketing, sales. There weren't many jobs at that point that would allow you to live anywhere other than New York, Los Angeles, London, Chicago. Even Tier 2 cities weren't really on the map for the kinds of jobs we had.
With the flip of a switch, we decided to sell our beautiful home in Topanga Canyon — and then we bought a house on FaceTime.
No bullshit.
In the village where I grew up.
My parents got divorced when I was five. We lived in Manchester, Vermont, and then after the divorce, my dad lived in Dorset, and I spent half my time in Dorset and half in Manchester. Five miles apart. But if you're from that area, you'd know that culturally, even those two little villages behave differently.
One's a village, one's a town.
Anyhow. We saw the flock of people moving to Vermont from New York and Boston, and the real estate market was going absolutely gangbusters. It felt like if we lost out on this opportunity — to be with my family, live somewhere I love and cherish, make something of a house — what a loss that would be.
Even by June 2020, three or four months into COVID, there was nothing to buy in Vermont. A house would go live on Zillow and within 24 to 48 hours, it was gone.
Back to my parents' divorce — after they got divorced, we sold the family house, and that house took years to sell. The average time on the market in Vermont when I was growing up was easily a year and a half. And now I was seeing houses fly off the market in 48 hours.
What the fuck?
So, ever the optimist, opportunist — however you want to frame it — I saw a wedge for us to get back to a place I needed and wanted to get back to for many reasons.
One was that my dad was in the final days of his life.
And I also just had a lot of healing I needed to do in Vermont.
Last night, Jonny and I had for dinner frozen chicken nuggets, frozen fries, frozen peas. They were all organic, mind you. And we sat, the four of us, around the table and did our high-low-buffalo of the day. And my high was: I'm just so grateful to be sitting around a table with a husband and two children, eating the most simple meal, laughing and smiling.
Having a moment that I never got to have as a kid. At least not one I remember consciously.
The thing about divorce — especially when it happens when you're five years old — is that it's a scar you carry for the rest of your life. Something in your nervous system gets rewired when you're way too young.
I'm not sure if you can ever properly recover from it.
So when I went back to Vermont, I was most excited about being able to experience it with my two kids. At the time we moved, Milly was about a year and a half, and I was about 25 weeks pregnant with Ernie. I thought — what an amazing opportunity. To live in the country as a family for a year or two. To be cozy. To get to do all the things I wish I remembered getting to do when I was that age.
When we moved to Vermont — in the house we bought on FaceTime, for the record, I do not recommend doing that — we bought a house on the same road where my grandparents once owned a home.
My mom is an interior decorator. My brother is a builder — carpentry, tiling, wallpaper, plumbing, you name it, he can do it. The plan was that my brother would do the rebuilding, my mom would act as GC and do all the interior design, and we would rent the Christmas house — actually one of my best friend's parents' houses, over the mountain from Manchester.
The plan was to live in the rental for six months while we restored the house.
Well.
What we thought would be fine-tuning ended up being essentially a complete rebuild. And I say this often — the fact that my brother and I are still talking, let alone closer than we've ever been, says a lot after what we went through in that rebuild.
The house listing on Zillow didn't even have any pictures of the inside. That should have been the sign. But ever the visualizer, I saw good bones and believed we could do something beautiful with it.
We quickly realized getting to the beautiful bit would take longer than we anticipated. You'd open a closet door and there'd just be a dead staircase. There was a garage in the middle of the house that was no longer a working garage. And to the back, an in-law suite — about 800 square feet — with a bathtub that looked like a hammam. Like a Turkish bath. A 400-square-foot Jacuzzi that took up half of the in-law suite.
The demolition alone took three months.
So we are literally demolishing the house we bought, living in the Christmas house — and that's when the 35-week scan happened.
In the middle of the demolition.
That's when we discovered there were anomalies in the scan, and that Ernie's birth wasn't going to be straightforward.
And then after he was born — I'll never forget — I've got Ernie on my chest, he's a week or two old, I literally cannot see straight based on what I went through during birth and then the unknown of what was going on with Ernie.
And Jonny is asking me where I think some of the light switches should go in the house.
Because also during that time, Jonny got laid off from Vice, a company he had worked at for — my brain would tell you ten years; you can look at his LinkedIn to confirm. And then my stepdad got diagnosed with throat cancer and was going through chemo and radiation.
So all of a sudden, we are back in Vermont, thinking my mom would be the GC of this house — and then my stepdad got sick, and it put their entire life into perspective. Next thing you know, they sold their house and decided to move to Florida. Because there's nothing like a scare of cancer, or death, to make you realize you have plans you want to see through.
So that time in our lives — the restoration wasn't just about restoring Ernie, who had five surgeries in his first year of life, six MRIs, probably a hundred-plus hospital visits. It was also restoring a 1930s house that most people would have just bulldozed and rebuilt.
And instead of having my mom as the GC — or anyone else — my husband said, you know what? I want to put my hands to work. I want to be the GC.
So my marketer husband turned into a Carhartt-wearing, hammer-holding project manager slash contributor in his own right. If you could look at the amount of money we spent at RK Miles — the locally owned, more artisan, better curated version of a Home Depot — in 2020 and 2021, holy shit.
My brother-in-law — who runs a very successful family business building beautiful homes — had warned us: if you want windows, order them now. There's a shortage. And I couldn't remember the window company at first — oh yeah, Marvin. All I knew was that if we were going to have windows, they needed to be Marvin windows.
So we ended up, for about eight months, with a rented trailer at the front of our house housing the windows we would put in eight months later — because we were terrified we weren't going to be able to get the black windows with the pine interior, because that particular window, at that particular moment, was the hottest commodity you could get in Vermont.
During the rebuild, my brother had two of his best friends from growing up working as part of the crew. Two of my favorite people. And having them around while I was going through everything I was going through made it all feel a little easier. I'd walk in to check on progress and immediately hear: "ANNE BENNETT, how you doin'? ERN DOG, what's shaking?"
They made me feel like me. Like I hadn't lost who I was. Without knowing it, they were helping me hold it all together — emotionally, quietly, completely. They made me feel like they had my back, as they always had. Like anyone who messed with me or my son would have a problem on their hands.
There was a lot of comfort in that.
The amount of moving parts I navigated during that time.
Oh, my word.
And then — after the restoration — there came peace.
We lived an incredibly beautiful life for five years in Vermont. We built a home we were so proud of, though it was actually less about pride. It was more about building a home we loved living in. A home that felt like the one I wished I had grown up in. Very similar in style to the one my parents had owned before the divorce.
And when I was in that house in Vermont, I almost went back to my own inner child. Not only was I grappling with what was going on with Ernie, while also doing everything I had in me to be the best mom to both Ernie and Milly — I was really searching for the truth of my own identity.
And that sounds really fucking heavy.
It was really fucking heavy.
I wasn't walking as much then as I do now. But I remember one night I messaged one of my best friends from growing up — whose brother had died in a tragic car accident. It was like 9 p.m. on a Saturday. I said, Mia, can you talk? I need you. And within a second, she called me.
I said: I'm so fucked up. I keep reliving all of these memories being here, and I can't stop reliving them.
I was walking down the street and someone — a family member somehow related to her brother's crash — drove by me. All of a sudden I got a pit in my stomach. Like I just couldn't get away from these stories I've lived that have plagued me.
Every morning I would drive to Manchester to drop the kids off at daycare. One of my best friends was shot by another friend who thought the gun was a BB gun. His sister walked that road every morning.
Every morning I would get a reminder of Jeff.
And then — my dad. Who had a big fall with dementia and Alzheimer's, and lost himself completely through it. Obviously there were parts of him still there that we did our best to hold onto. My sisters did the best job of any of us holding onto what was still real inside of him.
But then he passed away. That was October 2023.
So now I'm living in Vermont. My dad is dead. My mom and stepdad have moved to Naples, Florida. And I'm working remotely for a company based in Missouri, traveling from Vermont probably every ten days.
When you travel from Vermont, you drive to Albany — an hour and a half, call it. The flight times to Missouri had me waking up at 4 a.m. to get on a plane, then arriving back to Albany three days later at 11:30 p.m.
Every time the plane landed in Albany, while I was still on it, I'd text Jonny: I'm going to need a hotel tonight. I can't drive. I'm too tired.
Then I'd look at hotels in Albany, become quickly uninspired by the choices, and as I stepped outside and got a bit of oxygen, I'd be like: okay, fuck it. I've got this. I can do it.
So I would drive from, I don't know, midnight until 1:30 in the morning in complete darkness. The only thing I'd seen on the road for the last 30 minutes of the drive was a deer. And the only way I could stay awake was to drive in complete silence. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but music or a podcast can make me lose myself in the story or the rhythm. If I turn off all the noise, I'm able to hold myself accountable to what I need to do.
I think that's called ADD, PS.
All of these things started to wear on me.
I went to Jonny one day. We'd been talking — probably for three to six months at this point — about life feeling harder than we wanted it to feel. It was really hard to find childcare in Vermont. We'd tried an au pair, and the au pair was coming to America to live a big and full life in her twenties. And what the village of Dorset, Vermont, cannot offer is a big and full life for someone in their twenties who wants to socialize, shop, be active, and live as you want to live at that age.
So the au pair was bored senseless, and she decided to leave.
And once she decided to leave, I said to Jonny that I didn't think there was a way for it to work anymore. It was taking too much. And we were so desperate to raise our kids in this beautiful community with these beautiful friends who had become family that it got to a point where we were prioritizing what we thought was best for the kids over what was allowing us to be fully present and mentally healthy ourselves.
So, in the same way that we sold our Topanga house with the flip of a switch, we ended up selling our Vermont house the same way. In Vermont, we had our house and also a little cabin on a lake, 30 minutes away. We put them both on the market, call it July 1, and they were both sold within two weeks.
Some people would say, you should have priced them higher.
To those people, I say: please don't be a drain. We're happy with what we got.
And the resurrection part of the story.
Resurrection means so many things in so many different forms. To another one of my friends, who lives here in Austin, it means something very biblical. I called her and explained what was going on. I said: I'm in a fucking rut. I am so down. I keep feeling like I'm reliving these memories I don't want to keep reliving. I'm having to work so hard to keep the family afloat and keep this job while also traveling. It's just not making sense anymore.
And she said: Girl, you need to get to Texas. You need some God in your life, you need to get back to a city, you need to be somewhere where you can go into an office, go explore, listen to music, go to museums, and live all the things you like to do when you're living your true self.
She's one of my best friends from boarding school. I'm nearly 40, so I've known her for 25 years. And she said: I've never known you to be sad or depressed in your whole life. You have to figure it out. And if it is that place and the circumstances surrounding it that are doing it to you — it's time to leave. That doesn't take away from the fact that it held you and it was perfect for you for the time you were there. But maybe now "the spirit" — that's her evangelical code for God — is telling you it's time to go.
And I felt it, too.
God aside, my spirit was telling me it was time to go.
But when we left Topanga, it was a hell of a lot easier, because it wasn't home. And Vermont is home, and it'll always be home. Leaving somewhere you grew up, and selling a house you built thinking you might stay in it forever, took a level of courage and conviction that made a lot of people question: are they really doing that? Oh my gosh. How could they ever leave? How could they do this to their family? How could they do this to their friends?
One of my best friends — who is still in Vermont — I was talking with her a lot through it all. She had recently moved there from New Jersey, and the reason she had moved was for a lot of the same reasons I was feeling like I needed to leave. She had grown up in New Jersey and was living a lot of her inner-child identity, and wanted to move in order to blossom and be who she wanted to be in her next phase of life. She's someone who supported me so much and still does. Never made me feel like I was leaving her or the life we lived together and loved.
She knew it was time for us to go.
I also went to another one of my best friend's houses. She had recently had a baby and was upstairs in her bedroom, nursing. It was like 5 p.m. I said: Hey, I'm a mess, I need to come see you. And I went to her, and I said: I love you so much. Please don't hate me. But I gotta move. I think I gotta leave.
The thing about Vermont — it's the second-least-populated state in the country. And as a result, the bonds run really deep, the community is very strong, and you're all in it together. So leaving the group of friends who had become family — we had all moved there during COVID — literally felt like a breakup in some shape or form.
It was hard to explain why we had to go.
Some of our other best friends — I'll never forget, we were outside our house at the fire pit, looking up at the mountain, these beautiful trees — and one friend was like: are you really going to leave this? This community we have? How can you leave all of this?
She is one of the most empathetic, loving, unfiltered, and convincing friends I have. Everything she says, I deeply consider, because she says it with such intensity and conviction that if you didn't evaluate what she said, it's because you didn't hear it properly.
After that conversation by the fireplace, our house was already under offer. I called our realtor and said: please don't tell anyone in town, but I need to do a covert operation. I need to go see this other house that's for sale — three minutes from our house. Jonny didn't even come with me. I went to it just to make sure I wasn't running from the house we had. Because while that's where a lot of beautiful memories happened, it's also where a lot of the most challenging moments of my life happened. With myself, with Ernie, with my marriage.
Am I running away from this house, or am I ready to live somewhere else altogether?
And then I went on another walk, and I called my old boss, who is also a dear friend. It was 10 p.m. on a Saturday. I said: can you talk? And she called me within two minutes — she was outside a restaurant in New York — and I said: can you just give me permission to leave Vermont? Can you tell me I'm not insane for wanting to leave?
She's someone I've known for 15 years. When we were together, we were both living in LA, or I was working in London and she was visiting on business. She said: Girl, you were supposed to be there for a year. I don't know what the hell you're still doing there. Get the fuck out. Don't think twice about it. Either keep the house you have or there'll be another house in the future. Real estate is real estate, home is home. You'll always be able to go back.
It's time for you to get back to the real world.
And I know all of you folks in Vermont will not like hearing the phrase "real world." But for me, my real world is going into an office. My real world is being able to find a babysitter when I need it. Being able to walk my kids to school in five minutes. Being able to order food on Uber Eats when I don't have time to cook. Or get a Whole Foods delivery because I haven't had time to go to the grocery store.
And this story lives inside a bigger one that so many of us were told — that we could have it all, and that it wouldn't cost us anything.
I have a degree in communications and literally a minor in women's studies. I have been fiercely committed since the age of five — when my parents got divorced — to being an independent woman. Because when you are raised in a divorced home, you are raised by an independent woman, and an independent father, actually. And independence was something I believed I could have. Autonomy of choice. A career. Children. Travel.
I thought I could do it all.
Everything I read, everything I studied, everything I was taught made me believe I could do it all.
And the reckoning that happened in Vermont for Jonny and me was the realization that I can't do it all there. It was a realization that was sad. A realization I mourned for a long time leading up to the final decision, because leaving somewhere you love and leaving people you love is hell.
It hurts. It still hurts some days. Especially the ones who don't text you back when you text them.
The hardest people to leave were my sister and brother.
I asked my sister if I was crazy to leave. And she gave me some of the best advice anyone has ever given me. She said: you've flown by the seat of your pants your whole life, and it has done you well. Don't stop now. Vermont will always be here if you want to come back.
My brother acted like he was cool with it.
But I knew he wasn't — based on the number of times he stopped by in the final 72 hours to say his official see-you-soon.
They both cried like babies when they had to say goodbye to my babies. Even typing it makes me weep. To have had that time in Vermont, for my children to celebrate holidays and birthdays and enjoy run-ins with their auntie and uncle and cousins — that is something I will always hold very dear.
And why it was so hard to tell my sister and brother we were moving is that I knew it would break their hearts to be apart from Milly and Ernie. They love my kids the way I do. And I think all of us felt the weight of that — the kids being away from people who love them that completely.
The bonds aren't broken. They're as strong as ever.
Family is family. And where you live doesn't change how much you love.
So this is my story of how we process and how we rebuild. How we rebuild homes, create children. How we sometimes have to restore children. And then through the restoration, we rebirth ourselves.
I read something the other day: postpartum doesn't last three months. It takes two years for our hormones to return to their balanced state. And it takes five years for a woman to be able to reclaim her identity.
The fact that I have started writing and sharing so prolifically, just as Ernie turned five, isn't a coincidence.
It's when I reclaimed my identity.
It's when I resurrected
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I've shared mine.
Now I pass it to you.
peace is in you